Candidate Recruitment and Women’s Election to the State Legislatures1 Kira Sanbonmatsu Department of Political Science The Ohio State University September 2003 Report prepared for the Center for American Women and Politics, Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey 1 I thank the legislators, party officials, staff, and other respondents from Alabama, Iowa, and Massachusetts who agreed to be interviewed for this study. I owe them a great debt for their time and for sharing their experiences and perspectives. This research was funded by a CAWP Research Grant for Junior Faculty. I thank Barbara Burrell, Dianne Bystrom, Susan Carroll, Timothy Frye, Jerome Maddox, Debbie Walsh, and colleagues in the Department of Political Science at The Ohio State University for helpful suggestions on this research. Angela Stanley and Emily Kerns provided research assistance. Previous studies have identified important explanations for women’s underrepresentation in elective office, including the barriers of incumbency and the social eligibility pool. However, these studies only partially explain why men continue to outnumber women as candidates. Few scholars have examined the processes of candidate emergence and recruitment to consider how the preprimary phase may affect women’s election to office. I propose that the recruitment practices of the major political parties can help to explain the pattern of where women run for and hold state legislative office. In this report, I compare women’s candidacies across three states in order to shed light on who runs for the legislature under different conditions. I examine the candidate recruitment activities of the Democratic and Republican parties in three states: Alabama, Iowa, and Massachusetts. I find that the extent to which the parties are involved in recruiting candidates varies across states. The parties are most active in candidate recruitment in Iowa. Meanwhile, of the three states and two parties, the Democratic party in Massachusetts is the least active. Recruitment does not necessarily imply gatekeeping, however, as the parties are typically neutral in the primary. According to party leaders and staff, candidate gender is not central to candidate recruitment. However, beliefs about women’s electability vary across states, with some respondents arguing that some voters are reluctant to vote for a woman. In Alabama and Iowa, but not Massachusetts, women are believed to have a better chance of being elected in some parts of the state than others. These beliefs are likely to shape who is tapped to run for the legislature. Even where the parties are not actively recruiting candidates, party leader beliefs about the viability of women candidates may affect the emergence of women candidates because candidates are less likely to run if they think they cannot win. 2 I begin by discussing past studies of women candidates. I also provide background information about the states included in this study. I then analyze the results of interviews I conducted with party leaders and staff. I conclude by discussing the implications of this study for women candidates and for future research. Because this report is part of a larger, ongoing research project, the findings presented here should be considered preliminary. Existing Literature Past research on women’s underrepresentation has primarily emphasized two barriers to increasing the numbers of women in elective office: incumbency and the social eligibility pool. Because most incumbents are male and incumbents typically win reelection, incumbency is considered to be the greatest barrier to increasing women’s descriptive representation (Burrell 1994; Darcy, Welch, and Clark 1994). Therefore, the greatest gains for women are likely to occur through contests for open seats (Burrell 1994). In addition to the structural barrier of incumbency, women are less likely to be employed in professions that tend to lead to running for office, such as business and law—partly because women were historically barred from those professions (Thomas 1994; Darcy, Welch, and Clark 1994). However, women legislators are more likely to come from these backgrounds now than in the past (Dolan and Ford 1997). And as more women are elected and appointed to local offices, they in turn become part of the eligible pool of candidates for state and federal office. Thus, the expectations of previous studies are that (1) women candidates should benefit from the enactment of term limits because term limits create more open seats, and (2) the number of women in office should naturally increase over time as women become more integrated into the professions and women at lower levels of political office move up the political ladder. Past 3 studies have largely ruled out voter bias as an explanation for women’s underrepresentation because women and men tend to win their races at similar rates, controlling for the type of race (e.g., Darcy and Schramm 1977; Burrell 1994; Darcy, Welch and Clark 1994; Seltzer, Newman, and Leighton 1997). Both incumbency and the social eligibility pool continue to be the leading factors that help explain women’s underrepresentation today. However, the growth in the percentage of women legislators has been slower than scholars anticipated. After increasing for three decades, the percentage of women in state legislatures appears to have leveled off at about 22% (Carroll and Jenkins 2001; CAWP 2003). As Carroll and Jenkins (2001) recently argued, the lack of an increase in women’s presence in the state legislatures despite the adoption of term limits, and the apparent plateau in the percentage of women state legislators, demonstrate the limitations of existing explanations for women’s underrepresentation. It appears that our understanding of why more women do not seek office is incomplete. Incumbency continues to be an obstacle to women’s representation, but it cannot explain why more women do not run for open seats.2 Meanwhile, the social eligibility pool can better explain why men outnumber women in open seat contests. However, because only half of state legislators have held prior elective office, the eligibility pool can only be a partial explanation.3 In addition, women may come to office through occupations and backgrounds that are somewhat different from those of men (Carroll and Strimling 1983; Burrell 1994; Thomas 1994). 2 New approaches are being used in order to understand how gender may affect the decision to run at the individual level. For example, the National Women’s Political Caucus (1994) conducted a pilot of study of men and women attorneys and executives and women activists. In a study with a similar research design, Fox, Lawless, and Feeley (2001) sampled potential candidates in the state of New York by surveying lawyers, business executives, educators, legislative staff, and lobbyists and heads of interest groups. 3 This statistic is from a recent survey of state legislators (Pew Center on the States 2003). Nearly 60% of state legislators in the study did not hold elective office prior to serving in the legislature. 4 Studies of women’s representation have generally overlooked the role of political parties. Yet parties may partially explain the puzzle of why more women do not run for office. Because past scholars have suggested that women candidates stand to benefit from stronger party organizations and greater party influence over the nomination, the role of the parties in shaping who runs for the legislature may be important to understanding women’s underrepresentation. Strong party organizations may facilitate women’s candidacies because party leaders may recruit women who might not run for office otherwise. If there is a shortage of candidates, perhaps because the party is in the minority or because legislative service is time consuming but low paying, the party may need to recruit candidates. Party recruitment may be particularly helpful to women because women candidates may need more encouragement to run (Moncrief, Squire, and Jewell 2001; Fox, Lawless, and Feeley 2001; National Women’s Political Caucus 1994). Women candidates are also more likely than men to report that they were recruited (Moncrief, Squire, and Jewell 2001). Other studies have reached more negative conclusions about parties and women’s representation. Strong party organizations typically have a negative effect on women’s presence in the state legislature (Nelson 1991; Werner 1993; Sanbonmatsu 2002). In addition, most locally elected women in Niven’s (1998) study of four states reported that party leaders discouraged potential women candidates from running for office. Other research has found that women are slated to run as sacrificial lambs in difficult races (Carroll and Strimling 1983; Carroll 1994). Thus party gatekeeping and candidate recruitment may not facilitate women’s candidacies. 5 Background: Alabama, Iowa, and Massachusetts Part of the reason we do not know how party practices affect women’s candidacies is that we have very little systematic research on the candidate recruitment process across states.4 In order to gain insight into how candidate recruitment affects women’s candidacies, I conducted interviews in Alabama, Iowa, and Massachusetts in 2001 and 2002 about party practices, party strategies, and the status of women candidates in each state. This report is part of a larger project on women’s election to the legislatures that includes case studies of several other states.5 In choosing these states, I primarily sought variation across the cases on two dimensions: partisan composition and legislative professionalism (Sanbonmatsu 2002). Competition and the attractiveness of the office should explain the extent to which party leaders recruit candidates. Because the cases represent different combinations of partisan composition and professionalism, they should capture a range of party recruitment practices. These states also vary in region, ideology, political culture, and social diversity. These states have different levels of party competition, as is evident in Figure 1, which charts the Democratic share of house seats held by the two major parties over time. Figure 2 examines the state senate.